THE POLICE PROBLEM
The police problem is that police are policed by the police. Cops are accountable only to other cops, which is no accountability at all.
99.9999% of police brutality, corruption, and misconduct is never investigated, never punished, never makes the news, so it's not on this page.
When cops are caught breaking the law, they're investigated by other cops. Details are kept quiet, the officers' names are withheld from public knowledge, and what info is eventually released is only what police choose to release — often nothing at all.
When police are fired — which is all too rare — they leave with 'law enforcement experience' and can easily find work in another police department nearby. It's called "Wandering Cops."
When police testify under oath, they lie so frequently that cops themselves have a joking term for it: "testilying." Yet it's almost unheard of for police to be punished or prosecuted for perjury.
Cops can and do get away with lawlessness, because cops protect other cops. If they don't, they aren't cops for long.
The legal doctrine of "qualified immunity" renders police officers invulnerable to lawsuits for almost anything they do. In practice, getting past 'qualified immunity' is so unlikely, it makes headlines when it happens.
All this is a path to a police state.
In a free society, police must always be under serious and skeptical public oversight, with non-cops and non-cronies in charge, issuing genuine punishment when warranted.
Police who break the law must be prosecuted like anyone else, promptly fired if guilty, and barred from ever working in law-enforcement again.
That's the solution.
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Our definition of ‘cops’ is broad, and includes prison guards, probation officers, shitty DAs and judges, etc — anyone who has the authority to fuck over people’s lives, with minimal or no oversight.
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RULES
① Real-life decorum is expected. Please don't say things only a child or a jackass would say in person.
② If you're here to support the police, you're trolling. Please exercise your right to remain silent.
③ Saying ~~cops~~ ANYONE should be killed lowers the IQ in any conversation. They're about killing people; we're not.
④ Please don't dox or post calls for harassment, vigilantism, tar & feather attacks, etc.
Please also abide by the instance rules.
It you've been banned but don't know why, check the moderator's log. If you feel you didn't deserve it, hey, I'm new at this and maybe you're right. Send a cordial PM, for a second chance.
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ALLIES
• r/ACAB
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INFO
• A demonstrator's guide to understanding riot munitions
• Cops aren't supposed to be smart
• Killings by law enforcement in Canada
• Killings by law enforcement in the United Kingdom
• Killings by law enforcement in the United States
• Know your rights: Filming the police
• Three words. 70 cases. The tragic history of 'I can’t breathe' (as of 2020)
• Police aren't primarily about helping you or solving crimes.
• Police lie under oath, a lot
• Police spin: An object lesson in Copspeak
• Police unions and arbitrators keep abusive cops on the street
• Shielded from Justice: Police Brutality and Accountability in the United States
• When the police knock on your door
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ORGANIZATIONS
• NAACP
• National Police Accountability Project
• Vera: Ending Mass Incarceration
view the rest of the comments
The problem is normalization. The only-government-can-have-guns crowd pushes inaccurate perceptions to advance the agenda.
Black with a gun? Definitely get shot. White with a gun? Maybe get shot. Holding a gun at a place where someone did something with a gun? 110% you're getting shot.
This all while about 50% of Americans own guns. It's not like you simply assume every male is a rapist and kill them on sight just in case, or more accurately to my analogy charge every male within some distance of a rape occurring with a felony and put them on a list for life just to be safe.
I'm curious about what inaccurate perceptions you think they're pushing and what their agenda is. The inaccurate perception that we're the only country in the world with this amount of resource who are facing this problem? Is their agenda... preventing needless death?
There are a lot of well-meaning liberals who have been instrumental in taking guns out of the hands of... Pretty much, exclusively themselves. Most right-wing gun nuts already have their guns, they won't be giving them up anytime soon, and the American gun culture is incomparable to most other countries. If we could start over, less guns would work, but unfortunately we can't.
That isn't to say we shouldn't enforce things like red flag laws, but other things like trying to limit high capacity magazines in liberal states is just ceding weapons to the wealthy conservatives who think they can shoot down the local Jewish space laser themselves.
I'm just saying that if you feel like implementing a particular policy, you might run into a second civil war. Depending on what the policy is.
Foundational assumptions about this debate. A political party that's half of a government that killed 20,000,000 civilians in other countries over the last century is trying to convince you that you'd be better off without the ability to arm yourself to defend against rapists and the second amendment never had anything to do with discouraging tyranny here.
In addition to everything else you said, I think the problem is context in general. If there is an active shooter and three "good guys with a gun" whip out their weapons and start shooting, there are now four active shooters.
How often exactly does that happen? At worst what we've seen so far is either the shooter goes to the "sensitive place" next door where carry is prohibited or if a good guy stops the shooter and is still holding a weapon when the cops roll up, the good guy gets killed on sight.